This spring, reporting on Alberta politics is like covering the footrace of the blind.
The energies of Alberta's government leadership - elected officials and public servants alike - are being poured out on issues that, in the bigger picture, are inconsequential.
On the issues that matter - debt and deficit, education, health care, electricity, justice - the government is either fumbling and bungling (public finance and justice), procrastinating (health care and electrical power) or defaulting to unelected outliers like the Alberta Teachers' Association (education).
Only by closing our eyes to science and the world's 7.51 billion population can anyone claim that Alberta's "Climate Leadership Plan" matters one wit 10 metres from the province's borders.
While it may be the right thing to do for the province's health and environment, as the government claims, what really matters to climate change is what India and China do.
Both countries are more competent and focused in the development of alternative energy and off-coal actions than the myopic minds in Edmonton.
And the development of a "government in waiting," the centuries-old constitutional role for Her Majesty's official Opposition in the legislature has been diverted by the two-million-dollar-and-counting horse race to decide who will lead the organized conservative congregation.
The main accomplishment so far of the quixotic unification of the Wildrose and Progressive Conservative parties is to show unity is an aspiration of a political elite, not an authentic grassroots movement.
The decision by slender majority of the Alberta Liberal Party's 2,100 members June 4 to elect a leader, David Khan, who will not spend time and energy trying to unite the political centre - the Greens, Alberta Party and Liberals -- speaks to the new tide in public life.
Something more lasting than another cycle in the price of crude oil is taking place in Alberta.
The entire political culture is in flux.
Conservative unity doesn't matter. It may already be a thing of the past.
The conservative base that governed the province for 80 years through the dynasties of Ernest Manning and Peter Lougheed and has been home base for federal politicians like Preston Manning, Stephen Harper, Rona Ambrose and Jason Kenney, is is a spent force.
While Albertans were bemoaning the crude oil price and jobs trough, a parallel political revolution took place mostly in the cities and mostly among millennials and generation Zers - a revolution of anger born of frustration for an empty future and revenge for powerlessness during the conservative years.
The same political revolution is taking place in every western democracy.
In due course, this revolution will undo President Donald Trump.
Her ability to tap into it in 2015 is the principal reason why Rachel Notley is the premier.
There is no going back.
If the Alberta Liberals and David Khan can connect with these frustrated and indignant young voters and with them frame a third option to conservative and NDP policy, the election race of 2019 will have at least one runner who isn't blind.
- Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist, the author of four books and currently working on a history of Trimac Transportation.
"The energies of Alberta's government leadership - elected officials and public servants alike - are being poured out on issues that, in the bigger picture, are inconsequential."
